Longtime Georgia power Valdosta High School just finished a $7.5 million face lift of its 10,300-seat stadium, where the Wildcats outdraw and very possibly outspend small-college playoff qualifier Valdosta State.

And in Indiana — famously basketball-crazed Indiana— Lafayette Jefferson High drew up a privately financed, $8 million building project that already has delivered a 6,000-seat football stadium, complete with a high-end video scoreboard. A 22,000-square-foot athletic complex will house locker, weight and training rooms.

Want to slap your name on the Jefferson weight room? On the football office? On one of the 335 lockers? For $750,000 to $30,000 to $750, respectively, you can.

"When we're completely finished with it," says Maurie Denney, a 1965 alum now the school's athletics director, "we feel it will be the premier facility in the state of Indiana. People who come in go, 'Jeez, we're at Lafayette Jeff College.' "

The college connotation is apt.

For a while now, such free-spending, major-college heavyweights as Florida and Texas have acted as provocateurs in an athletics arms race — bumping up coaches' salaries and the plushness of facilities, inciting competitors to keep pace. It's a chase trickling down to high schools.

USA TODAY found evidence from South Carolina to Michigan, from Louisiana to Minnesota, from Georgia and Indiana to the high school football holy land of Texas.

Denton and Round Rock are participants in a stadium-building boom in Texas. The state reflects a growing taste nationwide for fancy scoreboard and video systems costing up to $750,000. More and more high school coaches are drawing better than $80,000 salaries with a select few hitting six figures.

The trend isn't as pervasive as it is among the NCAA's biggest football-playing colleges. There were 13,680 high schools playing 11-man football a year ago and officials maintain that a vast majority operate more modestly.

Still, during an annual 45,000-mile trek across 46 states, recruiting analyst Tom Lemming has noticed the high schools "are picking it up a notch, like the colleges are.

"Some states have free-transfer rules, where players can bounce around to different regions of a city, and that's where you see the new facilities come up," he says. "Particularly in Texas. Almost everywhere I go, it seems like everybody's bragging about their new facilities, how great they are."

Charles Breithaupt acknowledges as much. "Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses," says the athletics director of the Texas University Interscholastic League, which oversees high school sports in the state. "We're no different at the high school level than Florida State and Florida and Texas and Texas A&M. When one has a stadium renovation, the other school does the same thing. ... It is an arms race."

It comes as USA TODAY and others have raised the stakes, plugging high school teams into national rankings and crowning year-end national champions. High school games are now televised nationally.

Football makes money

The spending spiral also comes at a sensitive fiscal time, as education funding is tightening in many states. Georgia legislators, for example, made $180 million in education cuts in the state's fiscal 2005 budget. Valdosta's city school system has seen $3.5 million in state funding reductions over the past three years, according to superintendent Sam Allen, and its class sizes and tax rate consequently have crept upward.

Valdosta nonetheless budgeted $319,000 for football a year ago. By the time the Wildcats played their way to Georgia's AAAAA state championship game, the school actually had spent a little more than $419,000 on the sport — not counting another $100,000 in booster-funded renovations to the weight room and a multimillion-dollar stadium project.

That dwarfed the outlays for nearly all of the nation's top 26 high school programs, as determined by a composite of USA TODAY's year-end football rankings, which started in 1982. West Monroe (La.) puts close to $300,000 into the sport a year but the rest of those schools average about $61,000.

All but two of the schools provided spending information, though precise comparisons can be difficult because of bookkeeping differences from school to school.

Allen and others at Valdosta, which was No. 2 in the composite rankings, can draw another parallel to big-time college football: The program more than pays for itself, accounting for $469,000 in revenue and a $49,600 profit that helped subsidize the high school's 15 other varsity sports during the 2003-04 school year.

"We hear it all the time. 'We can't understand why you're spending so much money on athletics, on football. Why are you building a new stadium when they're cutting back funds for education?' " says Terry Daniel, the school system's athletics representative and keeper of the athletics budget. "I don't know how to respond to that other than if we do away with football, then you do away with all sports."

There and elsewhere, parents and other school patrons are signaling their athletic sentiments in the voting booth, endorsing local tax and bond measures. Or they're furiously fundraising. Or both.

Valdosta's stadium upgrade — spelled out in advance, along with a new fine arts center for the high school and replacement of a local elementary school — was financed by a 1% sales tax earmarked for capital improvements in education.

Suburban Detroit's Farmington Hills Harrison, No. 14 in the composite rankings, has a relative pittance of a football budget: $15,000, bolstered by some $30,000 a year from its booster club. But the school district is heavily into the better-facilities-by-taxation game; voters approved a $25 million bond issue in August to improve outdoor facilities at four middle schools and three high schools.

Harrison High will get new baseball and softball fields, synthetic turf for both its football stadium and practice fields and a football complex with a state-of-the-art locker room and training room.

Incentive comes from surrounding districts with open enrollment, giving Harrison competition from public as well as private schools for students. "The bottom line," says assistant principal Bill Smith, who oversees the school's athletics programs, "is that every student who leaves you is $8,000 less you have to spend (because of a state-funding formula based on enrollment).

"One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we offer so much in such a variety of areas that our kids will stay. But if facilities don't improve in your building or your district, sometimes that's the fine detail. ... If your band program's successful and your football team wins, that's the image your school has, even though your standardized test scores may not be the highest. People will come to your school instead. It's a shame, but it's the rules we play under."

The rationale is similar in Minnetonka, Minn., where the school decided three years ago to upgrade a football program overshadowed by powerful Eden Prairie just 15 minutes to the south. It now has a state championship-winning coach, a beefed-up booster club and a protective inflatable dome for its football field like Eden Prairie's.

Video scoreboards, too

Of course, no place does football fields like Texas.

Denton, in the Dallas area, just finished a 12,000-seat, $21 million facility being used by two high schools (with a third opening next year). Round Rock, near Austin, put $20.5 million into an 11,000-seat football and soccer stadium that's home to two district high schools and two middle schools.

Last month The Dallas Morning News listed 15 new or pending high school stadiums in the Dallas area alone with a combined price tag of $179.2 million.

That's not all for steel and concrete. Denton and Round Rock are among nine Texas high school districts that have gone to scoreboard and video system manufacturer Daktronics for top-quality video displays in the last four years. Mesquite bought two, comparable to units installed at Southern University and other second-tier football-playing colleges, for a combined $1.5 million for two stadiums.

Nineteen school districts nationwide have invested in Daktronics video systems since 2000, the overall number of units sold going from two in 2001 to four in 2002 and 2003 to 12 this year, according to the company's marketing and sales support manager, Mark Steinkamp.

In most cases, revenue from scoreboard advertising eases the financial burden.

While Valdosta-sized football budgets aren't the norm, Georgia High School Association executive director Ralph Swearngin estimates six to 10 schools in his state "would be in that neighborhood."

The AD at Athens' Cedar Shoals High, Charles Turner, so weary of trying to keep up, retired in May after 13 years on the job.

In Texas, which has seen cuts in health benefits for teachers and funding for textbooks, the UIL's Breithaupt says, "Taxpayers go, 'Wait a minute. You say we don't have enough money, but we've got these huge stadiums and we're paying these great stipends to coaches.' Those issues come up in front of the legislature from time to time, and it's important for our schools to take note of that."

At the same time, Frank Kovaleski, director of the Indiana-based National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, sees much of the spending as parent-driven, and not just focused on sports. "Parents wanting grand athletic facilities want an outstanding academic program at their school, as well. ... They want the best for their kids," he says. "I don't have a problem with that."

Yes, he says, the athletics arms race "probably has trickled down. (And) I think it could grow, just like at the collegiate level, where you can have parents in this community wanting what the parents got in the neighboring community."

In effect, he says: So what?

"Are you proposing we have a philosophy where everybody would have similar facilities?" Kovaleski says. "We've not had parity at the high school level ever, nor at the college level ever. And I don't think we ever will."

Best of the best

Using its final high school football rankings from 1982 to 2003, USA TODAY identified the nation's top 25 programs (actually the top 26 because of a tie at No. 25) over that 22-year span. Schools were awarded 25 points for a first-place season finish, 24 points for a second-place finish and so on: